Skip to main content

Twitter says it’s still investigating major outage

Twitter was hit by a service outage affecting users around the world on Thursday morning, though the precise number of people affected isn’t clear.

Those experiencing the problem were met with the message: “Tweets aren’t loading right now. Try again.”

Data from Downdetector, which monitors events like this, suggested the outage started shortly after 8 a.m. ET. Twitter’s support team hit the social media service at around 9:30 a.m ET to acknowledge the problem, saying: “Some of you are having issues accessing Twitter and we’re working to get it back up and running for everyone. Thanks for sticking with us.”

The service appeared to be restored for most users by around 10:30 a.m. ET, though at the time of writing, Twitter’s status page continues to show the message: “We are currently investigating this issue.

The outage is a rare event for Twitter and it has yet to offer any explanation as to why it happened.

As usual, plenty of folks had fun with the disruption, though it may have frustrated some in the Twitter community who rely on the service for work or other activities.

We've all been through this last couple of the hours#TwitterDown #Twitter pic.twitter.com/JjlK2P3pW1

— KindGeek (@kindgeeks) July 14, 2022

Everyone coming back to Twitter every 5 minutes to see if it’s still down 😭😭#Twitter #TwitterDown pic.twitter.com/1JXbQvvvsr

— PELS YEAR. BBN (@pelsyear) July 14, 2022

And the ol’ favorite:

Twitter was down and we couldn't tweet about it. #Twitter pic.twitter.com/VcfeoWlpPA

— Technext (@technextdotng) July 14, 2022

Twitter’s latest outage follows a couple of similar events that hit the social media service last year. In June 2021, for example, another issue that disrupted the service for millions of accounts globally took the company about three hours to sort out. However, unlike this latest problem, it affected only the desktop site and not Twitter’s mobile app.

And in October another outage occurred as people were flocking to the site to express frustration about disruption on Facebook, WhatsApp, and Instagram in what was clearly a case of particularly bad timing.

Editors' Recommendations

Trevor Mogg
Contributing Editor
Not so many moons ago, Trevor moved from one tea-loving island nation that drives on the left (Britain) to another (Japan)…
Look out, Twitter Circle is exposing private tweets
A stylized composite of the Twitter logo.

Twitter Circle launched last summer as a feature that lets you tweet to a specific group of people. In the company’s own words, Twitter Circle allows for “more intimate conversations and [to] build closer connections with select followers.”

But according to multiple reports, some of these private tweets have been reaching the rest of the platform, which, depending on the nature of the content, could result in some rather awkward situations.

Read more
Elon Musk’s latest plan for Twitter hasn’t gone down well
A digital image of Elon Musk in front of a stylized background with the Twitter logo repeating.

Elon Musk has said that from April 15, Twitter accounts will have to be subscribed to Twitter Blue to have any chance of their tweets appearing in the For You recommendations feed. Membership of Twitter’s premium tier will also be required to vote in Twitter polls, he said.

Musk, who acquired Twitter in October 2022 in a deal worth $44 billion, said the move was “the only realistic way to address advanced AI bot swarms taking over” the For You feed. Offered as an alternative to the Following feed, For You deploys an algorithm to serve up tweets that it thinks you’ll like, often from accounts that you don’t follow.

Read more
Twitter braces itself after source code leaked online
A stylized composite of the Twitter logo.

Parts of Twitter’s source code have been leaked online, according to a legal filing with the U.S. District Court of the Northern District of California.

First reported by the New York Times, the contents of Twitter’s source code -- the all-important software that powers the platform and makes it work -- showed up on GitHub, an internet hosting service for software development.

Read more